On another message board I go to, it was recently said: "It amazes me that there are still people who seriously suggest that Trump is controlled by Moscow." I don't exactly see what's "amazing" about that. There is actually some circumstantial evidence that the relationship may go back potentially all the way to 1987!
What really persuades me though isn't the famous dossier (which yes I find wholly believable) or the circumstantial evidence to which I have just alluded or anything that's come out of Robert Mueller's investigation to date. It's the evidence of Trump's behavior as president that convinces me beyond doubt that he's a tool owned by Moscow.
Far more than just his border policies, Trump has also brought us into a trade war, primarily with U.S. allies, and not least of which the European Union. He's also supported Brexit when the vote happened, just yesterday argued forcefully that British Prime Minister Theresa May had not pursued a full and sufficiently aggressive form of Brexit that would adequate isolate the UK from the EU, that France should withdraw from the EU, and has just been touring Europe touting NATO as a kind of protection racket wherein Europe either pays their protection money or else we just won't be responsible for what happens. He has also pledged to withdraw our support from the Kurdish fighters in Syria (a cause particularly important to me, as a strong ideological ally of their's) by the end of the year so that the Russian-controlled regime of Bashir Al Assad, together with the also-Russian-controlled regime of Erdogan in Turkey, can destroy them as a reward for their (mostly complete) defeat of the Islamic State! He has also withdrawn us from major international bodies and agreements ranging from the Paris Accord on climate change to the UN Human Rights Council and beyond. He is clearly pursuing an isolationist policy on a wide range of fronts. And it's in that context that I have to question the motives behind his proposals to let Russia rejoin the G7, his government's curious attempts to lift sanctions on the Russian state, and much more. Why is a hostile foreign government that illegally intervened in our last presidential election curiously the one major and consistent exception to Trump's zeal for American, and indeed Western, isolation? You see what I'm getting at? He ACTS like a foreign agent! THAT is what persuades me more than anything else that he, in fact, is one.
And thanks to these ongoing investigations (to say nothing of the fact of who one of campaign managers was!), we have a steadily growing body of evidence to show plentiful motives and opportunities for this kind of corruption to have happened. And it could go all the way back to his first forays into American politics. As far as I'm concerned, that Trump is first and foremost working in the service of Moscow is not an opinion, but a self-evident fact at this point.
Yesterday the American president was forced to hide out in the British countryside for his meeting with the British prime minister because over in London, hundreds of thousands of protesters were jamming the streets to denounce the meeting's occurrence at all in no uncertain terms. Will he meet with a comparable reception when he visits Russia to meet with Vladimir Putin in private in a couple days? Of course not. That contrast concentrates much. That our current government is more hated in London than in Moscow tells you what you need to know about the nature and status of our international relationships.
I just don't get the denialism. We may not have all the details yet, but the picture seems clear enough to get the basic idea at this point. What is it that persuades the American president's supporters that there's nothing fishy going on here with regard to the current administration's relationship to Vladimir Putin's government?
